A Tolkien nerd’s thoughts on The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey

The first Hobbit film is true to the books, but has more flaws than virtues.

Before going forward, an important spoiler warning: this article assumes that you've seen An Unexpected Journey and have read The Hobbit, and takes no pains to avoid spoilers for either. As such, it will spoil not just the movie and the book, but probably also many elements of the next two Hobbit films. If you haven't read the books and want to be surprised by the next two movies, do not pass beyond this point.

I first read J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit when I was no more than eight or nine years old. The Lord of the Rings trilogy followed when I wasn't much older than that. I continue to make a point of reading through all of the books (and their appendices, at least the ones that aren't concerned with Elvish grammar) at least once every couple of years or so—even making it through The Silmarillion two or three times. I haven't read every posthumously published scrap about Middle Earth that Tolkien's son has seen fit to compile and publish, but my credibility as a Tolkien nerd should go unquestioned.

Apple Editor Jacqui Cheng, Social Editor Cesar Torres, Lead Developer Lee Aylward, and I will all be discussing An Unexpected Journey, the first of Peter Jackson's long-awaited Hobbit film adaptations, on Friday's upcoming episode of the Ars Technicast. In the meantime, I wanted to really examine the film as it relates to The Hobbit and also to Jackson's Lord of the Rings films, then distill the many mixed reactions I had during and after the movie into something a bit more coherent. As a fan of both, I've been awaiting An Unexpected Journey with some excitement, but more apprehension: on the one hand, it's a chance to revisit Jackson's lovingly rendered film version of Middle Earth. On the other, a much-criticized decision to make The Hobbit into three movies has only exacerbated fears that it would be a cash grab lacking in the care and craft that went into either the books or the first film trilogy. I ultimately came away disappointed in the movie, but not in the way I thought I would be.

Cut from the same cloth

An Unexpected Journey better integrates the events of The Hobbit with those of The Lord of the Rings.

The Hobbit was first published in 1937: 17 years before the publication of The Lord of the Rings in 1954 and 1955, before much of the world-building that Tolkien did for those books and the posthumously published The Silmarillion had been thought out. Despite numerous (and sometimes quite substantial) edits for the book's second and third editions, this means The Hobbit at times feels a bit disconnected from the rest of the Middle Earth legendarium. There are hints of things wider and deeper sprinkled throughout the book as it exists today—there's a mention of Moria, and the Necromancer who factors into some of the book's subplots is in fact Sauron himself. However, where the events of The Lord of the Rings are often tied directly to people, places, and things from bygone Ages, the world of The Hobbit is significantly smaller.

One of An Unexpected Journey's strengths, then, is that it better integrates The Hobbit with the rest of the canon. Locations like Rivendell, identical to its Lord of the Rings counterpart, and the presence of characters not even named in the book(Saruman and Galadriel, among others, with Orlando Bloom set to return as Legolas in at least one of the next two films) make the stories feel more like they're pieces of the same whole.

The tone of the movie is also a step forward in this regard. The events of The Hobbit occur on a much smaller scale than in LOTR—the fate of the world hangs in the balance in the latter and it's hard to have higher stakes than that. The movie versions of The Hobbit's events are rendered with an epicness consistent with the LOTR movies. The integration and fleshing out of narrative threads that either appear elsewhere in Tolkien's work or are only summarized in The Hobbit itself—the war of the dwarves in Moria, the threat of the Necromancer—make the story feel more significant. There are some parts of The Hobbit that aren't really built to support all of this added weight, but we'll get into that more in a bit.

Characters who would go on to appear again in LOTR are also lighter in the earlier book—The Hobbit's Gandalf is more flighty than his LOTR counterpart, and LOTR's ever-somber Elves are merry to the point of silliness in The Hobbit. The movie version again smooths out these inconsistencies, bringing the Hobbit characters who appear in both books more in line with their LOTR renderings.

A sense of place

Enlarge/ Hobbiton, which was built in New Zealand for The Lord of the Rings films and still stands as a tourist attraction today, is but one of Jackson's beautifully rendered Middle Earth locales.

Another strength of An Unexpected Journey— and Jackson's Tolkien adaptations in general—is its rendering of Middle Earth's locations. The movies take locations like Erebor (which by Tolkien's descriptions seems like little more than a few dark, cavernous hallways and the treasure room inhabited by Smaug) and make them into huge, beautiful set pieces that look worthy of the significance placed upon them by the narrative. They look lived-in, and in almost every case they're superior to the mental images that I've formed over the years that I've been reading these books.

Doing right by Tolkien

Any movie that says it's going to stretch The Hobbit out into three films is going to need to take some liberties with the source material, mostly in the form of additions. Some of the changes made to the narrative in Jackson's LOTR movies broke with Tolkien's versions of events in a way that weakened the story. An UnexpectedJourney happily avoids these pitfalls, even when it's filling in the blanks by inserting its own material or fleshing out events which were merely implied in the books.

Most of the changes made to the book's narrative are driven by a need to transform that book (which relies on an omniscient narrator and, often, the unseen internal thought processes of its characters) into a film. Both the book and the film are about not just Bilbo's physical there-and-back-again journey between The Shire and the Lonely Mountain, but also Bilbo's mental journey from timid, too-comfortable hobbit to a minor hero in his own right.

Enlarge/ Bilbo's transformation from stay-at-home hobbit to unlikely hero is by necessity more rapid and more overt in the film.

Warner Bros.

In the book, a large part of Bilbo's transformation is shown through internal monologue and his first overtly heroic deed comes rather late in the game, when he saves the dwarves from giant spiders in Mirkwood and then later helps them escape imprisonment by the elves who live in the forest (material that, based on the pacing of this first movie, will probably crop up in the second of the three Hobbit films).

Because this film is split three ways (and because showing a character thinking to themselves is, at best, dull cinema), An Unexpected Journey needs to make this mental transformation happen both more quickly and more obviously. To make it more obvious that the Bilbo at the beginning of the story is entrenched in his own too-comfortable rut, there's a scene where Gandalf tells him so. To kickstart his transformation from timid to heroic, it is Bilbo (rather than Gandalf) who thinks to stall the trolls until they're turned to stone by the rising sun. And to really drive home his character's growth, by the end of the film Bilbo is standing up against wolves and orcs all by his lonesome to prove his worth to Thorin and company, and to himself. All of these are changes to the book's version of events, but none of them feel wildly inconsistent with Tolkien's narrative or with his characters.

Thorin's character has also been tweaked slightly for the film. His stubbornness and pride, qualities present in the book but only really emphasized near the end (and, coincidentally, in one of Tolkien's Unfinished Tales recalling the events of The Hobbit from Gandalf's perspective), is made explicit in several scenes. The film's Thorin also has a particular dislike for elves, where the book's Thorin has no particular distaste or love for them (save after being captured and held in Mirkwood by Thranduil and the wood-elves, but even then his beef is with them specifically and not the race as a whole). These character tweaks didn't make too much of a difference in this first movie but will pay dividends later when he's captured by Thranduil (probably in the second movie) and when he's negotiating with the men and elves for shares of Smaug's treasure after the dragon's defeat (probably in the third film).

Enlarge/ The film's Thorin Oakenshield differs from the one depicted in the book, but the changes are consistent with his characterization in some of Tolkien's more obscure writings.

The last big change to The Hobbit's core narrative is Azog, an orc fought by Thorin at Moria who serves as Bilbo and the dwarves' primary antagonist this outing. Azog is indeed a character from the books—the battle outside Moria is depicted in one of the LOTR appendices and Azog is mentioned briefly in The Hobbit, though in the books another dwarf kills him during that battle and he has no particular dislike of Thorin.

This is another change that was necessitated to some degree by the source material, though I'm not sure how it will play out in the end. The vast majority of The Hobbit is presented in concise, cut-up chapters, and while Smaug is the de facto villain, he's not an immediate threat to the heroes until toward the end of the story (and he's dispatched after only a handful of chapters). The Necromancer is likewise a threat on a larger scale, but he has little impact on Bilbo and the dwarves. A more immediate antagonist is necessary to drive the action, and Azog fills that role well enough (though as villains go he's about as one-dimensional as they get).